Good Day Citizens and welcome to this week's podcast edition of the Thomas Jefferson Hour.

This week it's volume six of the Jefferson Hour Book Club.

It is, we've been looking at books that matter either to Jefferson or to us about Jefferson.

And this is Ron Chernau's magisterial, Alexander Hamilton.

Chernau is an amazing man himself.

He's written a bunch of books.

Washington A Life won the Pulitzer Prize.

I haven't read it.

House of Morgan 1990. He wrote a biography of John D Rockefeller

in 1998 and his most recent book is a biography of Ulysses S Grant. He's become like Joseph Ellis and David McCullough,

one of the, Doris Kearns Goodwin, one of the supreme public intellectuals of our time.

And we both really enjoyed this book.

I think both of us had read it before,

but re-read it for discussion this week.

And it's not just a great historical biography, but it gives a lot of insight not only to Hamilton, but to those around him, Madison, Jefferson, Washington, others.

I think Jefferson comes off as a Machiavellian figure in this

book as not altogether reliable and not always truthful in his epic fight against Hamilton and

Hamiltonism. So that troubles me a little. I think that that's a something of

a distortion, but leaving that aside, if you want to understand Alexander Hamilton you want to read this book it's worth all 800 pages it's very very well written

I read I suppose I read most of it in a two and a half day period.

But you have to work at it. I mean, it's not a pamphlet by any means.

Yeah, but I have found it more enjoyable the second time around. I really did.

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